For most people getting into ketosis can take 2-7 days. But who wants to wait that long? Find out how to reach ketosis faster.
Ketosis is the name of the metabolic state in which your body uses fat as energy instead of glucose from carbohydrates. How fast you get into ketosis depends on a lot of different things.
Some examples include how much muscle mass you have, what you were eating before trying to get into ketosis, how tall you are,…
For some people, this means that you might take a full week to get into ketosis.
However, there are some things you can do to get into ketosis faster. The sooner you get into ketosis, the faster you can start to burn the fat away.
These tips can also help you if you’ve recently messed up your ketogenic diet.
1. Do a fast
Fasting is one of the greatest ways to reach ketosis faster.
Ketosis is a process that happens in the body every single day regardless of the total number of carbs you eat. There will almost always be some fat present in your food or your body just uses a little body fat for fuel.
However, for a lot of people, this is only happening in tiny amounts.
For these people, the moment ketosis will occur most is when they go to sleep. When you are sleeping there is not a lot of energy coming in from food but you still need energy to do things like keeping your heart beating.
One way that energy can become available is by converting body fat into energy in the form of ketones. In moments like these, you are in “ketosis”.
With low–carb diets, you can keep your body in ketosis for longer periods of time. The key point of these diets is that you limit your intake of carbohydrates enough.
And you don’t consume carbohydrates if you’re not eating anything. This is where fasting comes to mind.
There will always be some carbohydrates and protein in the foods you eat, even on the ketogenic diet. Excess protein can get converted into glucose too.
To get into ketosis faster you want to reduce the amount of glucose coming in and maximize the glucose being burned.
For the first part, fasting is ideal. There are many different types of fasting. You need to figure out which one is the best for you.
2. Increase healthy fat intake
The benchmarks of a ketogenic diet are determined by total calories. To get and stay into you want your carbohydrate intake to be about 5% of your total calories.
So, by increasing the number of calories coming from the fat you consume, you decrease what percentage of your total calorie count comes from carbohydrates
You don’t necessarily have to do a fast to get into ketosis, if you stick to a diet with a small number of carbs you can achieve the same.
The amount of calories you consume still has an impact on your weight, even in ketosis. If you overdo it you might see no weight loss on keto.
3. Limit your protein intake
This was briefly mentioned before but this is a fairly common mistake keto-dieters make.
The ketogenic diet is not just a low-carb diet. It’s also a medium protein diet and there is a reason for this.
If you consume more protein than you need, your body can turn the excess protein into glucose. Glucose can kick you out of ketosis or at least slow down how fast you get into this state.
Exactly what keto statistics you have to follow in terms of calorie percentages depends on your exact goals, personal situation, and training habits.
That being said, a rough general recommendation is to keep protein to a maximum of 25% of your total calories on keto. If you exercise a lot, especially weight lifting, you can get away with a bit more.
At this point, protein may sound like a bad thing for keto but that’s not the case. Your body absolutely needs protein to function. It’s just that overdoing it can slow down getting into ketosis.
4. Exercise more
The next thing you can do to reach ketosis faster is to exercise more.
To get into ketosis you need to limit the amount of glucose coming in and deplete the glucose fuel stores present.
As mentioned, excess sugar gets turned into something called glycogen. Glycogen is stored in your muscles and liver to be converted into glucose later.
If you do the ketogenic diet the right way, the amount of carbohydrates coming in will be small enough to get into ketosis. Now all that’s left is depleting the glucose fuel stores.
The best way to do this is high-intensity exercise or lifting weights. When doing cardio your body will still rely a lot on stored fat as fuel compared to the previous kinds of exercises.
Generally, the higher the intensity of the exercise the faster you will deplete your glycogen stores and reach ketosis.
5. Increase intake of medium chain triglycerides
The last tip is to increase your intake of medium chain triglycerides otherwise known as MCTs. These MCTs are the type of fatty acid that your body can turn into ketones easily while avoiding an insulin spike.
One thing keto-dieters sometimes use is pure MCT oil. MCT oil is supposed to be super easy to digest and absorb. It pretty much skips your stomach and goes straight to your liver.
There, it can be converted to ketones faster than most other oils.
If you don’t want to use MCT oil, there are other natural oils primarily made up of medium-chain triglycerides like coconut and palm oil.
MCT oils can help you get more into ketosis but if you want this to be a lasting effect, you still need to deplete glycogen stores and limit carbohydrate intake.
